The Essex Serpent(59)

‘Give him this, then,’ said Taylor, who knew the boy rather better than his mother suspected, since he’d had a habit of slipping out of the Red Lion unnoticed and clambering up into the ruins. He passed Cora a piece of broken plate on which she made out a snake coiled around an apple tree.

‘More serpents,’ said Charles. ‘There seems to be a lot of it about. Cora, I haven’t finished with you yet: we’re staying at the George and it strikes me you could do with a drink.’

Seated comfortably in the parlour of the George, it was not William they discussed, but Stella. Her letters to Katherine had taken on a spiritual cast (‘Not,’ said Charles, looking horrified, ‘what one expects of a clergyman’s wife!’). Her God had slipped into something that had little to do with the thundercrack above Mount Sinai: she seemed instead to venerate a series of sensations she associated with the colour blue. ‘She told me she meditates on it day and night – that she carries a blue stone with her into church, and kisses it – that she can only bear to wear blue, because other colours scorch her skin.’ Katherine shook her head. ‘Is she ill? She was always a little silly, I suppose, but cleverly so – it was as if she’d chosen to be silly because it’s a characteristic so often expected of women that it’s almost admired.’

‘And she’s always hot,’ said Cora, thinking of how she’d held her hands when last they’d met, and of how they’d been like those of a small child in fever. ‘But how can she be ill, when she grows more beautiful each time I see her?’

Charles poured another glass of wine (‘Not bad I suppose, for an Essex pub’), and holding it to the light said, ‘William says he called the doctor, and that she can’t shake off the flu. He’d like to send her away somewhere warm, but summer is icumen in, as the old song goes, and she’ll be basking soon enough.’

Cora was not so sure: Luke had said nothing to her (he’d departed Aldwinter as swiftly as he could, as if he still felt William’s hand on his collar), but she’d seen his watchful appraisal of the woman as she’d chattered amiably about the cornflowers she was raising from seed, and the turquoise drops she wore in her ears; watched him take her pulse, and frown. ‘The other day she told me that she’d not seen the Essex Serpent but heard it, only she didn’t know what it had said.’ She drained her glass, and said: ‘Was she joking, playing along, knowing I half-think there’s something there after all?’

‘She’s too thin,’ said Charles, who mistrusted anyone who did not eat. ‘But – yes – beautiful: sometimes I think she looks like a saint seeing Christ.’

‘Can’t you get her to see Luke?’ said Katherine.

‘I don’t know – he’s a surgeon, not a doctor – but I would like to – I’ve thought of writing to ask him.’ It struck Cora – just then, as the rain ceased and left everything quiet – how fond she’d grown of the woman, with whom she had so little in common, who doted on her reflection and on her family, who somehow knew everyone’s business better than her own, and only ever meant well. Should I envy her? she thought: Should I wish her gone? But she didn’t, and that was that: Will’s wife was welcome to him, as far as she had him. ‘Look,’ she said: ‘I must go – you know how Frankie counts the hours – but I will write to Luke – and yes, Charles, yes: I will write to the good Reverend – I will be good, I promise.’





Cora Seaborne

2, The Common

Aldwinter 29th May Dear Will – Charles tells me I must apologise. Well: I shan’t. I cannot apologise when I don’t concede I’ve done wrong.

I have been studying the scriptures, as you once urged me to do, and observe (cf. Matthew 18 15–22) that you must allow me a further 489 transgressions before you cast me out.

Besides – I know how you spoke to my son about sin – and I had no quarrel with you over that! Must we make battlegrounds out of our children?

And why should my mind cede to yours – why should yours to mine?

Yours,





CORA





Rev. William Ransome

The Lodge

Aldwinter

31st May

Dear Mrs Seaborne

Thank you for your letter. Naturally you are forgiven. In fact I’d forgotten the incident I suppose you allude to and am surprised you mention it.

I hope you are well.

Kind regards,

WILLIAM RANSOME





III

TO KEEP A CONSTANT WATCH





JUNE





1


Midsummer on the Blackwater, and there are herons on the marsh. The river runs bluer than it ever did before; the surface of the estuary is still. Banks gets a good catch of mackerel early in the day, and notes with pleasure the rainbows on their flanks. Leviathan is decked with spikes of rosebay willowherb and a rosemary wreath, and a patch of samphire grows at the prow. At midday Naomi lies alone by its black ribs with her skirt up by her hips, saying her solstice spells. Joanna has stayed late at her school desk and says she’ll not move until she can recite all the bones in the human skull. (Occiput, she says as Naomi leaves, and the redhaired girl remembers it, to be used late one night in a curse.) The Essex Serpent recedes for a time, since how could it thrive under so benevolent a sun?